


all talk of circadian rhythm

by thisstableground



Series: ITH main timeline [12]
Category: In the Heights - Miranda/Hudes
Genre: Character Study, Gen, Insomnia
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-30
Updated: 2020-04-30
Packaged: 2021-03-01 23:40:46
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,330
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23925538
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thisstableground/pseuds/thisstableground
Summary: Five reasons why five people are awake at 2AM.
Series: ITH main timeline [12]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1070721
Comments: 11
Kudos: 38





	all talk of circadian rhythm

Benny is on the night shift, a cab driver for a boss that isn’t Kevin Rosario any more, making his rounds from the home base of a different dispatch with a different and less familiar name above the door.

Driving along Riverside and with the sounds of conversation in the backseat blurring into the sound of the radio he leans an elbow on the open driver’s side window, tasting 2AM on the air and letting the cool breeze keep him alert: Benny is not cut out for night shifts. This is only temporary, covering for a colleague who needed to work days for a while to stay with a sick family member at night, proving himself all over again to a new boss who doesn’t know him as anything other than yet another driver. In a broader sense it is temporary because one day he won’t be driving cabs at all, if he has any say in it. It is temporary, the eavesdropping on couples arguing after too much alcohol, listening to the laughter of giggling groups of friends, bearing silent witness to frantic rides to the emergency room, cabs the makeshift ambulance of the broke and desperate. Temporary the fifteen minute friendships he makes with customers who like his taste in music, and the slurs thrown through the glass divider that he never responds to, and the relative quiet of the road in the night shift at the exact midpoint between busy 10pm and peaceful 6am.

When he finally gets back home, he eats breakfast before he goes to bed in the earliest light of creeping dawn, temporarily nocturnal.

***

Sometimes it takes an hour, sometimes two. Some nights like tonight it takes so long to settle down that Usnavi feels like he’s barely closed his eyes before his alarm goes off for work. No matter how little sleep he gets the store will open on time, and he will smile the smile of a man who regularly gets the recommended eight hours at everyone who comes in.

It’s this terrible, itchy silence that does it, he thinks, turning his pillow over like that might make a difference. The silence that isn’t silent of a noisy city, where he can be dead on his feet all day waiting for work to be over so that he can rest, but the second the lights are out and his head hits the pillow he’s crowded with the noise of every siren and shout outside his window. The silence of stopping, finally, because it’s only when he stops that the stress and happiness and hope and hopelessness and all the thoughts he doesn’t give himself time to think about during the day flood in like a dam breaking and he can only wait it out until exhaustion wins the fight.

Even now, as he jiggles his legs in agonized restlessness and rolls over for the hundredth time hoping to find the magic position that will instantly knock him out, Usnavi does not consider himself an insomniac. He assumes that this is simply a natural part of the sleep cycle for everyone. Even now, all these years later, he can’t help but hear the silence of an apartment that was once full and is now empty.

***

Sonny used to sleep like a baby when he was, well, a baby. Whether by genetics or bad luck or the pure fact of being fifteen years old, these days he is as restless as his cousin. Unlike his cousin he does not simply drown in it till sleep submerges him: he has always been inclined to take action.

Being fifteen years old, he has very little personal freedom and he has school in the morning and he is still figuring so, so many things out, and so most of the time the only action he can take is to throw his thoughts out into the world before he can think better of it. He sits up lit by the glow of his phone, and writes and writes and writes. Messages of friendship and affection and stupid memes in groupchats. Blog posts of world-changing plans and philosophies, half well-informed and half the idealism of someone so nearly grasping at concepts so much bigger than he has yet learned to comprehend. He posts showerthought tweets and films ten-second TikToks of in-jokes so many layers deep that they have a target audience of two, and Pete is almost always awake to respond immediately to all of them.

In the wakeful self-awareness of morning Sonny will groan at his own semi-coherent rambling, delete tweets and edit blog posts and tear pages out of his journal, but it is not morning yet and so what becomes embarrassing later is still fresh enough to simply be honesty.

***

Vanessa almost never suffers from insomnia, at least not when she’s in her studio away from the insomnia-by-proxy of Usnavi’s fidgeting sleeplessness. Vanessa chose every item in her home with absolute care, and she sleeps the pointedly deep sleep of someone who has something to prove: this is _her_ bed and she earned it.

If Vanessa is awake it’s because she has chosen to be, and she pours all of the bottled sensations that might disturb her rest into this one Saturday all-nighter. Night is the time where there are no expectations or problems or stresses, only lights and music and the burn of tequila and the burn of her feet in heels too high and the heat of a crowded dancefloor. The time where she doesn’t listen to catcalls and doesn’t listen to whatever she’s saying in drunken bathroom conversations with a group of girls she doesn’t know and is best friends with only for this evening, never to meet again, all only the background noise of 2AM in the club.

She developed a taste for late night when she was young, when this was the opportunity to sneak away, when she never let something like being underage or the danger of walking alone in the dark stop her from slipping through the shadows down the fire escape leaving all the weight of her mom and the fighting and the drinking in the apartment up above her, and she holds onto it still as a moment to be purely _Vanessa_ and nothing else.

***

Nina neatly stacks all her work and books and laptop away before she goes to bed, in order to draw an environmental line that says _it is time to rest now_. It has never been successful. Life is short and the night is long and there is no way to distinguish between study and sleep when your whole life is lived in one bedroom in overcrowded student housing.

She lies in bed and thinks about all the work she could be doing, _should_ be doing, until in her pajamas and the light of the desk lamp, she takes out her notes and boots up her laptop and does none of her work, staring at the screen and thinking of how she should be asleep. She’ll regret this in the morning when the bright lights of the lecture hall with their faint background hum are somehow like a lullaby and she has to press her pen down like she’s etching stone tablets to stay focused on her notes. 

Gently swaying the desk chair in a soothing side-to-side motion, she thinks of all the things she did the day before that she might have done differently, not always because she did them wrong but simply because she made a choice and she doesn’t know which part of her life she has shaped forever with that choice, from the momentous to the innocuous. Nina’s life is a constantly growing flowchart with branches on branches of maybes and what ifs and what if nots. There is always something else she should be doing instead.

It is only late night in California but it is almost morning in New York, in Puerto Rico, and Nina is awake.

**Author's Note:**

> Please comment if you liked it! Thank you!

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [[PODFIC] all talk of circadian rhythm](https://archiveofourown.org/works/24087895) by [Oceantail Podfics (Oceantail)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Oceantail/pseuds/Oceantail%20Podfics)




End file.
